Posted by Nicholas Stix
As Hurricane Katrina bore down and weather experts sounded the alarm, every hour counted. Yet Mayor Ray Nagin waited to order a mandatory evacuation, FEMA director Michael Brown held off on readying adequate relief, and Governor Kathleen Blanco and President Bush exchanged form letters instead of urgent phone calls. An excerpt from the 2006 book The Great Deluge lays out the farce behind the tragedy.
By Douglas Brinkley
June, 2006
Vanity Fair
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2005. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin convened a press briefing at noon at City Hall. Casually dressed, his shaved head shining in the media lights, Nagin strained to seem like a man in charge. The day before, Louisiana’s low-key governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, had declared a state of emergency. Reports from meteorologists indicated that Hurricane Katrina was growing ever more menacing. “Although the track could change, forecasters believe Hurricane Katrina will affect New Orleans,” said Nagin, 49, scratching his trimmed goatee. “We may call for a voluntary evacuation later this afternoon or tomorrow morning.” In terms of emergency preparedness, only a mandatory order would have been taken seriously by the public. But Nagin haltingly explained that he needed to confer with city lawyers about his options.
As politicians go, Nagin was a showboater. Just that morning, in fact, the New Orleans Times-Picayune had reported on the mayor’s latest venture: acting. A few days before, he had made his film debut in an indie thriller called Labou. For five hours—in the thick of the tropical-storm season—he had rehearsed and delivered his lines. His role: a corrupt Louisiana mayor. As he left the set he was in a boastful mood, reportedly calling out, “Hollywood South, baby!”
A New Orleans native with an M.B.A. degree, Nagin had become a local powerhouse in cable TV. In 2002 he jumped into politics. A virgin candidate with no public record whatsoever, he campaigned as a law-and-order reformer who would weed out corruption. Once in power, he became a darling of the conservative business elite, an African-American who was a virtual chamber-of-commerce cheerleader when it came to New Orleans’s future. (Behind his back, some African-American city-council members called him “Ray Reagan.”) Though he helped bridge differences between the city’s blacks, who made up 67 percent of the population, and whites, who accounted for 28 percent, his short tenure had been a rocky one. Within two years, the local murder rate had skyrocketed to almost 10 times the national average. When it came to good governance and keeping the peace, many considered the C.E.O. mayor, in Texas parlance, all hat, no cattle.
Among Nagin’s chief concerns that day: that hotel owners—at the center of the city’s $5 billion tourism trade—might be in a position to sue if their businesses were to be disrupted because of a mandatory evacuation. Instead of concentrating exclusively on the needs of the 112,000 citizens who didn’t own cars and could not leave the area “voluntarily,” instead of marshaling the personnel and deploying the resources necessary for confronting the storm, Ray Nagin stalled.
In Washington, D.C., Michael D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), received a briefing from the National Hurricane Center (N.H.C.) on Katrina’s potential severity. Like Nagin, Brown responded by letting the day pass. He didn’t send adequate emergency-response management teams. He didn’t call on fleets of buses to be in position to move in after the storm. He sent two senior public-affairs officials and then waited to see what would happen.
In Baton Rouge, Governor Blanco, in contrast, took action. She began encouraging New Orleanians to go door-to-door and persuade their neighbors to leave. She oversaw the effort to route traffic lanes to facilitate a safe exodus from the region. She held a conference call with Louisiana officials and 65 legislators from the coastal parishes, trying to coordinate last-minute disaster-preparedness measures. She ordered more than 200 Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries vessels to be ready and waiting outside the projected danger zone.
And yet, instead of placing an urgent phone call that day to President George W. Bush, Blanco decided to send him a legal form requesting that he declare a federal state of emergency in southeastern Louisiana. While her letter followed proper protocol, she neglected to specify her state’s needs for federal transportation, for rescue boats, for other vital items and manpower. Just as Nagin wasn’t properly communicating his city’s needs to Blanco in Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge wasn’t properly communicating with Washington, D.C. (President Bush was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and he responded in kind to the governor’s form letter. In legally correct fashion, he complied with her request for federal assistance, authorizing FEMA “to coordinate all disaster relief.”)
At five p.m., the governor and the mayor held a press conference. They were visibly uncomfortable with each other. They jointly announced that in anticipation of Katrina a voluntary-evacuation order had been issued for the city. But their message was mixed. A New Orleans resident could have taken such a directive to mean a lot of things. Just that afternoon, the N.H.C.’s Advisory Number 18 had warned that “Katrina could become a Category Four hurricane later tonight or Sunday.” That should have been Nagin’s lead. It was, at least, in the Times-Picayune’s early Sunday edition, which ran a big block-letter headline: “Katrina Takes Aim.” The chain of responsibility for urban evacuation, highly debated after Katrina, was really quite simple, according to homeland-security mandates: the mayor; the New Orleans director of homeland security; the governor; the federal secretary of homeland security; the president.
That evening, N.H.C. director Max Mayfield phoned Blanco. He wanted her to know that Katrina was barreling Louisiana’s way and that he was “sorry.” His voice was maudlin and full of trepidation. “Thank you, Max,” she said. “But you need to talk to Ray Nagin.” A frustrated Mayfield said, “I’ve been trying to talk to him, but I can’t reach him.” An exasperated Blanco put Mayfield and Nagin in touch, and when they finally spoke, Mayfield made his point forcefully: “Mr. Mayor, I’ve never seen a storm like this. I’ve never seen conditions like this.”
Andrew Travers, a graduate student in history at Tulane, spent his Saturday evening at Pat O’Brien’s, the French Quarter bar, downing “hurricanes,” a potent rum-and-fruit-juice concoction created in the 1940s by revelers waiting out a ferocious tropical storm. (The recipe, according to New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse: two ounces each of light and dark rum, one ounce each of grenadine, orange juice, and sour mix, one teaspoon of sugar, with orange wedges for garnish.) Not unlike various watering holes around town, O’Brien’s was packed—one giant “hurricane party”—the cocktails being pounded back by rebels determined to booze and boogie on, whatever came their way.
SUNDAY. At exactly 10:11 a.m., as winds accelerated to 175 m.p.h., an urgent National Weather Service (N.W.S.) advisory was sent to media outlets and government officials. There was very little sober science in it, only savage imagery, like some white paper by way of Dante’s Inferno:
Hurricane Katrina … a most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength.… Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks … perhaps longer … at least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail.… All wood framed low rising apartment buildings will be destroyed…Power outages will last for weeks.… Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.… Few crops will remain. Livestock left exposed to the winds will be killed.…Once tropical storm and hurricane force winds onset … do not venture outside!
The impassioned, unconventional advisory had been composed by Robert Ricks, a forecaster at the N.W.S.’s office in Slidell, Louisiana. Ricks was the hurricane’s Paul Revere. For his wording, he relied on an N.W.S. collection of phrases recommended for hurricane bulletins, many of which had never been used before. Ricks, who had grown up in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, had drafted a text that created an apocalyptic picture anyone could understand. “It just happened to be me that day,” Ricks later explained to NBC’s Brian Williams. “I would much rather have been wrong in this one.”
Just as Ricks was composing his advisory, Ray Nagin issued the order for the first mandatory evacuation in the history of the city. “I wish I had better news,” he said, “but we’re facing the storm most of us have feared. This is very serious. This is going to be an unprecedented event.… I want to emphasize, the first choice of every citizen should be to leave.” The mayor advised those who couldn’t find a way out of New Orleans to head to the Superdome. He asked citizens to check on their relatives and neighbors in advance of the crisis. “This is an opportunity,” he said, “for us to come together in a way we’ve never done before.” He was joined by the governor and other officials.
Blanco, 62, looked ashen, even though she had applied circles of rouge to her cheeks. She was not a typical Louisiana politician. Plump and schoolmarmish, her face displaying a hangdog cast, the governor had become known for both her bedrock decency and her fairly charmless courtesy. She was also shrewd and had some of the good-ol’-boy toughness of an old-time southern pol. A former schoolteacher, she always dressed impeccably, often adorned with a double strand of pearls and a Louisiana-state-seal pin on her lapel. Odd as it sounds, this was the same woman whom FEMA chief Michael Brown would later describe in this way: “Blanco reminded me of an aunt I have whom I love to pieces. But I would never trust this aunt to run a state or be a mayor. She was just a wonderful human being. I just see Blanco as this really nice woman who is just way beyond her level of ability.”
That ominous Sunday, standing with Nagin, Blanco relayed a message from President Bush, expressing his concern and his hope that the mandatory-evacuation order would be heeded.
As Katrina approached, the most respected broadcasting voice in Louisiana was that of radio announcer Garland Robinette, of WWL, 870 on the AM dial. Nobody knew why he had such a clear, deep, comforting lilt, but he did. Reared in a shack behind a Humble Oil swamp camp, near the small Cajun community of Des Allemands, Robinette understood rank poverty. Feisty and independent-minded, he had gotten kicked out of Nicholls State University for punching the golf coach. After flunking out of L.S.U., he shoved off to Vietnam, serving as a Swift Boat officer and eventually receiving two Purple Hearts. In the Mekong Delta, he learned about the horrors of combat, death, and destruction. He also learned never to fully trust the U.S. government.
As he headed over to the fifth-floor studio of WWL, Robinette, 62, had a flashback. “I got goose bumps,” he said, reminded of how animals in the jungles of Southeast Asia had seemed to instinctively disappear before a firefight. “It was Vietnam all over again. I looked up. There were no green parrots in the palm trees. I looked down the street, not a stray cat.” That evening, Robinette settled in front of the microphone and didn’t mince words: “I know the powers that be say not to panic. I’m telling you: Panic, worry, run. The birds are gone. Get out of town! Now! Don’t stay! Leave! Save yourself while you can. Go … go … go.”
MONDAY. The eye of Katrina, a strong Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 m.p.h., struck the shore at 6:10 a.m. It hit just to the south of the hamlet of Buras, about 63 miles southeast of New Orleans. Virtually all of the fishing village’s 1,146 households were flattened. Livestock and wildlife drowned en masse; the residents, fortunately, had fled.
Robinette took listeners’ phone calls. Desperate pleas were coming in from Tremé and Chalmette, Slidell and Metairie. A woman screamed, “We have a two-year-old—I think we’re going to drown.” All the while, the radio station’s high-rise building shook like a struck tuning fork. Then the studio’s plate-glass window blew outward. An airstream, like that of a jet engine, almost sucked Robinette through the opening. Everything around him—papers, books, furniture, tapes—went flying into the morning sky. Even so, Robinette kept on broadcasting, shifting his operations to the closet. He told his listeners that, while wind damage would be extensive, Katrina seemed to be sidestepping the city, aiming its fury farther east.
Holed up in N.O.P.D. headquarters on nearby South Broad Street was Warren Riley, then the deputy chief of police. His dispatchers were overwhelmed. In the first 23 minutes after the hurricane swept through town, they received more than 600 desperate calls. The levees were being breached, storm surges were topping floodwalls, roofs were peeling off, and people were dying. Homes were being destroyed by the second.
One SOS came from police officer Chris Abbott, who was trapped when waters from the 17th Street levee engulfed his Lakeview bungalow. Riley, Captain Jimmy Scott, and others huddled around the radio as Abbott pleaded for help. “I can’t get out of my attic,” he said. “The water is rising. It’s up to my waist. I’m trying to get out. It’s up to my neck.” Abbott tried to camouflage the panic in his voice. “I apologize for asking for help.”
“Chris, do you have your gun?” Scott asked.
“Yeah.”
“How many magazines have you got?”
“Three. The water’s up to my chin!”
“Listen, take your weapon, your three rounds, and fire a circle into the roof Then try to punch your way out.”
“The water’s up to my mouth,” Abbott said. “I really don’t know that I’m going to make it. I really apologize.”
At that juncture radio contact ceased.
“We heard absolutely nothing for a good 30, 40 minutes,” Riley recalled. “We think the worst has happened to Officer Chris Abbott. Then … we hear him. He’s out of breath, saying, ‘I’m on a roof.’ ”
Abbott was rescued by the N.O.P.D., and even though he had lost his home, he was back on the job the next day, rescuing stranded New Orleanians.
Mayor Nagin decided to cloister himself in the Hyatt hotel, which loomed over the Superdome, a locale the mayor chose not to speak at, presumably fearing reprisals from evacuees enraged at what many perceived as his lax response to the hurricane—charges Nagin would vigorously refute, saying, “There was no way to pull [a speech] off. There was no megaphone system. There was no microphone.” Many of the Hyatt’s windows had blown out. The building swayed in the winds, a jagged, gaping monstrosity. He decided to make the hotel his Emergency Operations Center, virtually abandoning City Hall because his bodyguards had told him the Hyatt “was safer.”
In the coming days, Nagin often divided his time between an office lair on the 27th floor, the 17th floor (where he had sleeping quarters), and the 4th floor (which had electrical power). While certain mayors in the storm’s path were out and about, putting their lives at risk on Monday afternoon, raising morale and checking up on everything after Katrina’s onslaught, Nagin was comparatively sedentary, getting the latest news courtesy of a hand-cranked radio straight out of The Waltons. To many, he appeared to be a commander stuck in his bunker.
Nothing in Michael Brown’s résumé seemed to recommend him to lead America’s disaster-relief efforts. Self-centered and blandly suave, traits amplified by a regal demeanor, Brown was a cuff-link-shooting Republican dandy. As he shuttled between TV interviews on Monday, he received an e-mail from a female colleague at FEMA saying, “You look fabulous—and I’m not talking the makeup.” Flattered, Brown fired back, “I got it at Nordsstroms [sic]. E-mail [FEMA spokeswoman LeaAnne] McBride and make sure she knows! Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?”
Brown’s job came courtesy of cronyism. As the governor of Texas, George Bush had learned to rely on his chief of staff, Joseph Allbaugh, who would go on to be his campaign manager during the 2000 presidential election. Allbaugh knew how to raise funds, manage personalities, and navigate the rough-and-tumble of power politics, but he had little experience in disaster preparedness. For his efforts, however, he was rewarded with a job as FEMA’s director. When Allbaugh stepped aside in 2003—once FEMA had been absorbed into the newly created Department of Homeland Security—his position went to Brown, one of his college friends. To give Brown credit, he performed ably during the rash of Florida hurricanes in 2004. And he was very much on the job in August of 2005, advising the administration early and often on the approaching storm. But he would become, unwittingly, one of the most visible and all-purpose federal scapegoats in recent memory.
At noon on Monday, Brown, adopting caution as his leitmotif, made an incredible announcement, actually directing emergency responders outside the region to stay home until specifically summoned by local authorities. “The response to Hurricane Katrina must be well coordinated between federal, state and local officials to most effectively protect life and property,” he said in the statement. “It is critical that fire and emergency departments across the country remain in their jurisdictions until such time as the affected states request assistance.”
At six p.m., President Bush telephoned Governor Blanco. Shell-shocked, disconcerted, and running on no sleep, she told the president that Katrina had decimated much of Louisiana. She was near tears. Though the hurricane’s wrath had been more muted than expected, the city’s fragile levee system had not held. Soon, it would become clear: the 17th Street Canal had been the first of three serious breaches, flooding neighborhoods below sea level. The long-anticipated worst-case scenario—New Orleans as Venice—was occurring.
“We need your help,” Blanco pleaded. “We need everything you’ve got.” The utter open-endedness of Blanco’s request told the president that there was a leadership problem at the governor’s mansion. (Behind her back, according to Brown, Bush regarded her as “totally incompetent,” while his senior adviser Karl Rove, in Brown’s view, saw an “opportunity to denigrate her for political advantage.” The White House denies Brown’s characterization of the administration’s attitude toward Blanco.)
The governor intuited the situation. “You know, I asked for help, whatever help you can give me,” she later snapped, discussing her lack of specificity that day. “If somebody asks me for help … I’ll say, ‘O.K., well, I can do this, this, this, and this. What do you need?’ But nobody ever told me the kinds of things that they could give me.” With no detailed request from either Blanco or Brown, Bush didn’t pursue the matter actively enough.
As for Brown, Bush seemed to trust him wholeheartedly. While Brown’s hesitation may have been understandable from a bottom-line, C.E.O. perspective, Bush’s failure to take immediate action was a grave mistake, even if doing so would have meant letting Blanco take credit for positive results. Great presidents in a time of crisis rule by instinct, bypassing the limitations of novice governors. But given Blanco’s vagueness, Bush, understandably, demanded specifics. What he failed to comprehend, however, was that federal troops should have been filling the vacuum and weren’t.
At seven p.m., Brown received an urgent call from Marty Bahamonde, his FEMA representative on the scene, who had just toured New Orleans by helicopter. His main concerns: with 80 percent of the city underwater, there was virtually no ground transportation into the metro area; shelter was scarce for thousands who had lost their homes; search-and-rescue missions were critical as citizens stood on roofs and balconies; throngs were headed to the Superdome, where food, water, and equipment for medical teams were dwindling. Bahamonde’s laundry list had a sobering effect on Brown. He understood that the future of New Orleans was at stake. “I was beginning to realize,” Brown recounted, “things were going to hell in a handbasket.” Under the circumstances, Brown did exactly the right thing. At eight p.m., he called his boss, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, upon whose shoulders lay the federal government’s ultimate responsibility. Overwhelmed by his department’s lack of preparation and convinced that the governor’s and mayor’s operations were, in his words, “dysfunctional,” Brown sought guidance from a superior. Tragically, it was the first time the men had spoken all day.
Chertoff, for his part, would later claim that he was unable to reach an elusive Michael Brown all the next day, even though he tried repeatedly. Chertoff, a principal engineer of the Patriot Act, is a Harvard-trained prosecutor and jurist whose sunken cheeks and closely cropped beard give the impression of a haggard academic denied tenure. According to The Washington Post, Chertoff seemed to downplay the early, bleak reports as rumored or exaggerated. He also insisted that FEMA was doing an “excellent” job. On top of it, he kept to his Tuesday plans to attend a medical conference in Atlanta.
TUESDAY. In the early morning, there was only fatigue in the air and puddles on the runway. Governor Blanco climbed into a Black Hawk helicopter. Accompanying her were Brown and Louisiana’s two U.S. senators, Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. All over America the morning TV shows were whipping up passions about the dispossessed on rooftops, the unhinged looters lurking along empty boulevards, the Lego levees. Now Blanco and her guests were going to get their own aerial view. Peering out the window, all Blanco could do, at first, was sigh, shake her head, and cry. Senator Landrieu grew ill when she saw the pervasive damage, calling her trip “a helicopter ride from hell.” Both Blanco and Landrieu would lose second homes that had been in their families for years.
With no media in tow, Blanco later that afternoon headed via helicopter to the Superdome, which housed nearly 20,000 displaced residents. Within half an hour, she was at the doors, trying to offer words of hope. “There were a lot of upset people,” Blanco said. “I vividly remember this lady who … was just fretting and fretting because the children in her family had left on different helicopters and she didn’t know where they were.” Everybody, it seemed, wanted to touch Blanco, to tell her his or her Katrina story. Never once, she said, did she worry about her personal safety.
Blanco deserves high marks for her ability to improvise in the days after Katrina. She barely ate or rested. She did absolutely everything she could to help the storm’s victims. She ordered a search for school buses and drivers. But she was making mistakes. Why not issue an executive order which would have forced parishes to donate their buses to the evacuation effort? Instead of the 100 buses her team rounded up, she might have had hundreds more at her disposal. (The next day, FEMA would inform Blanco that its buses would be arriving at the Superdome that afternoon. Her aides exhaled a few hallelujahs and stopped making calls for vehicles. The only problem was that the buses never arrived in significant numbers that day. It wasn’t until late Wednesday that some FEMA tour buses made it to the stadium.)
New Orleans was no longer a city. It was a smattering of islands. About 75,000 people were stranded, many on the verge of drowning or forced to remain trapped on rooftops, in attics, or on exposed stretches of dry ground. Individuals recognized with a jolt that they were entirely on their own. All at once, 10,000 years of civilization had been stripped away. Protection from danger was gone. Water was undrinkable, food scarce. Emergency care was nonexistent. Seniors were often abandoned. More than 25,000 people had congregated in the convention center, where conditions were deteriorating. Thugs preyed upon the weak. People were expiring.
Once looting started in New Orleans, the Department of Homeland Security retreated even further. FEMA decided it would not put its employees in harm’s way. The Department of the Interior, for example, offered FEMA 300 dump trucks and vans, 300 boats, 11 aircraft, and 400 law-enforcement officers. FEMA turned it all down, saying the agency wasn’t going to expose its workers to looters, snipers, and felons. “All assets,” read one e-mail, “have ceased operations until National Guard can assist TFs [task forces] with security.”
Some of the city’s richest residents stepped into the breach, taking security into their own hands. In New Orleans’s upscale Uptown neighborhood, well-heeled and well-armed property owners, sometimes with security guards to assist them, kept possible looters at bay, carrying firearms openly in their neighborhoods and looking after neighbors’ homes and valuables—even keeping a close watch on friends’ irreplaceable art collections. Attorney Calvin Fayard—one of the region’s major political fund-raisers for the Democratic Party, and the owner of the so-called Wedding Cake House, one of the city’s grand mansions—would remain at home and on guard with a coterie of like-minded friends. Some would use their powerboats to rescue the marooned. Their neighbors would dine on gourmet food from nearby specialty stores. Some would bathe in their stagnant swimming pools. One or two would take the opportunity to fly by helicopter to the office to shred potentially sensitive business documents—to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands, should law and order break down altogether.
That afternoon, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu tried to find Mayor Nagin. (This spring, in fact, Landrieu has been running against Nagin to become the city’s next mayor.) He wanted to ask Nagin, face-to-face, why school buses and those belonging to the Regional Transit Authority (R.T.A.) hadn’t been activated to transport evacuees from the Superdome and, instead, had been left in parking lots that were then submerged by floodwaters. Arriving at City Hall, he asked to see the mayor. His request provoked howls of laughter. Eventually, at the Hyatt next door, Landrieu located Sally Forman, the mayor’s communications director. “I’m looking for Brenda Hatfield,” she told him, referring to the chief administrative officer of New Orleans. “We must find her.… We’re looking for the R.T.A.-bus keys We don’t know if she has them, but she’ll know where they are.” The mayor couldn’t even find the ignition keys.… to the handful of R.T.A. buses that hadn’t flooded, let alone mobilize the drivers. It would have seemed farcical if the circumstances hadn’t been so dire.
“I went up to the top of the Hyatt and saw the mayor,” Landrieu said, recalling the 27-story trek that some visitors had to make if they wanted to meet with Nagin. “He was sitting in a room, trying to pick up information from the TV and radio.” Just outside the Hyatt windows, flood-ravaged people could be seen at the Superdome, waiting for food, water, and a ride to freedom. “Mr. Mayor, is there anything you need?,” Landrieu asked. As the lieutenant governor recalled, Nagin stared straight ahead and answered, “We’re looking for a command-and-control structure.”
To some observers, the naïve politician was turning into a pathetic figure, the city’s skipper who didn’t know what a boom was. But behind the scenes, Nagin was actually making inroads at the highest levels of the U.S. government, conferring with Karl Rove, among others—a political end run by the White House that Governor Blanco would soon come to resent. “It was midweek, either Tuesday or Wednesday,” Nagin would recall, describing one key conversation with Rove. “It was a couple of different things. It was making sure the White House understood what the challenges were, and then secondarily I was working with him on legislation as it relates to the recovery.”
Nagin’s own account suggests that he wasn’t hunkered down in the Hyatt. “We had gotten into a routine,” he said of his work with local officials and staffers, “where we’d meet and discuss in the morning and I’d fly up and survey what was going on. I’d check on the Superdome, check on the troops. Kind of manage the things. I met with the press mid-morning and late in the afternoon. After lunch we’d have some meetings to try and direct some resources.”
WEDNESDAY. The record shows that President Bush had been attentive on the eve of the deluge, promising support to Gulf Coast governors and, while on vacation, participating in two videoconferences about the storm. He cut short a trip to Southern California to fly back to the White House and deal with the crisis, but not before making a stopover at an event in the San Diego area at which country-music singer Mark Wills presented him with a guitar bearing the presidential seal, as cameras clicked away. It was an odd juxtaposition: the commander in chief strumming a fake chord or two while Americans were watching concurrent footage of inexplicable agony.
On its way east, Air Force One flew over New Orleans, dipping to 1,700 feet. The city was silent, except for the whir of helicopters. The engines of the president’s 747 filled the void for miles as the stranded, on rooftops and roadways, looked up to watch the jet’s passage, some waving for help. It was unnatural, a scene too reminiscent of the hijacked planes swooping low through the skylines of New York City and Washington, D.C.
At one point Rove made his way to the back of the aircraft. He invited photographers and reporters to the forward compartment to document President Bush surveying the damage. If it was intended as a photo op—as a depiction of a compassionate president—it backfired. No one had expected Bush to go to New Orleans, pick up a bucket, and start bailing, but making a detour in a jet was a purely hollow gesture. White House political advisers admitted later that he appeared neither in command nor empathetic. Instead, he seemed imperious and disconnected, quite literally. “It looked,” said one, “like he didn’t know what was going on.”
At 2:20 p.m., Governor Blanco phoned the White House. The president took her call. Blanco described the devolving state of affairs and requested 40,000 troops (which the region would eventually receive). If they were to be dispatched to her state, Blanco expected all National Guard troops would be officially under her control. She would not agree to cede the sovereignty of Louisiana or the foothold she had as its governor. “I clearly stated [my position],” recalled Blanco. “ ’Mr. President, I definitely need more troops, but I do not want to federalize the troops. What I want is some soldiers with equipment that can help us. We have a lot of work in the aftermath of our lifesaving operations.’ ”
Blanco’s communications director, Bob Mann, was one of those giving Governor Blanco media advice. A decision had been made to leave the press to fend for itself: no embedded reporters. There was a thin line between grandstanding and mourning, and the governor wasn’t going to cross it by staging too many media events. Mann soon came to believe, however, that sources around or within the Bush administration had launched a public-relations onslaught against his boss, blaming Blanco for negligence or incompetence, as they eventually would do to Brown as well. “It was pretty obvious,” Mann recalled. “We were getting telephone calls from reporters who were citing the White House as their source. It was just coming at us in waves.… ‘The White House is saying … ’ ‘White House officials say … ’ They were sticking it to us. But then, at the exact same time, they were publicly saying, ‘This is not the time for a blame game.’ ”
THURSDAY. The president consented to an interview on Good Morning America with co-host Diane Sawyer to discuss the catastrophe. “I want people to know there’s a lot of help coming,” he insisted. At times he was simplistic and vague, as when Sawyer asked him to compare the devastation he saw at the World Trade Center site with that of the Gulf Coast after Katrina. “Nine-eleven was a man-made attack,” he offered. “This was a natural disaster.” At one stage, the president remarked, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees”—even though he had been personally briefed only four days before on the possibility that the levees might fail. Many viewers, though, were assuaged by the interview, believing that the U.S. couldn’t have responded more quickly because the federal government had been caught by surprise.
A glimmer of hope shone as the federal government finally seemed to swing into action. The cavalry was arriving, in the person of Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, commander of the Joint Task Force Katrina—along with 7,400 troops destined for Louisiana and 6,000 more for Mississippi. Honoré explained that troops would continue to arrive until the total reached about 30,000.
Once in New Orleans proper, Honoré immediately began redirecting the soldiers—and anyone else who came into view. Having grown up on a Lakeland, Louisiana, farm, Honoré, a mixed-heritage Creole, was impatient, blunt, and absolutely relentless in pursuit of a goal. The moment he hit land, he made his presence felt. “Put those damn weapons down,” he snapped at Guard troops he saw on a military vehicle, looking as though they were riding into open warfare. Over and over again, he admonished National Guardsmen that they were not in Iraq, and that they needn’t point guns toward residents unless provoked. It was the sense of cool strength for which the city had been longing for days.
Citizens were being moved to shelters. Breaches were being filled with sandbags. Soon, people hoped, the waters would recede. Along with several others, Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson, 70, was holding a session with Mayor Nagin on the fourth floor of the Hyatt. Suddenly, a police officer burst in. “Let’s go, Mr. Mayor,” he said. “Gotta get you outta here.” Nagin stood up, grabbed Clarkson by the elbow, and headed for the stairwell, ready to make the climb to his quarters on the 27th floor. After conferring privately with the officer, Nagin turned to Clarkson, filled with concern. “There’s a couple of rabble-rousers, leading [a] mob from the Superdome, and they’re trying to get through the Hyatt doors,” Clarkson recalled him saying, as if referring to some pitchfork vigilantes.
The mayor seemed extremely worried. “Mr. Mayor,” Clarkson said, “they’re after you, not me. You’re important and you’re young. You get up those stairs.” Nagin, according to Clarkson, insisted she come with him, for her own safety. She followed.
Nagin spent the rest of Thursday in the Hyatt. Unable to communicate with the outside world, he munched on peanuts and tuned in to Garland Robinette’s program. “The mayor had a radio and we would take turns winding it up,” Clarkson recalled. “It was a present his wife had given him for Christmas. An old kind of battery radio to listen to WWL. He didn’t even have a transistor. We kept looking out the window at all the people on the bridge between the Hyatt and the Superdome.… That was the first time we heard all the criticism [of the New Orleans city government] on the radio.”
Also ensconced in the Hyatt was Nagin’s tireless communications director, Sally Forman (who has recently assisted her husband, Ron, president and C.E.O. of the Audubon Nature Institute, in the 2006 race for mayor, against Nagin and Landrieu). A staunch defender of the mayor’s during the crisis, she insisted her boss wasn’t hiding in the Hyatt; instead, she said, he didn’t want to be seen as grandstanding. “Symbolically the mayor felt that they didn’t need another political person in a rescue boat,” Forman explained in his defense. “The best thing the mayor could do was run the operation on the ground. Politically it was perhaps a mistake.”
Nonetheless, these two strong-willed women had been urging Nagin to show his leadership stripes, abandon the hotel, and get out in the streets. Like President Bush, he seemed above the fray. Even when Nagin had taken a boat trip to various flooded neighborhoods, according to a close aide, he had made sure that his clothes stayed clean. Now, taken aback by the radio callers and fearful that the mayor might be accused of having gone AWOL, Clarkson urged him, “Get on the radio and tell them what happened.” Forman agreed.
The two women secured a satellite phone in Nagin’s temporary bedroom, on 17, and the mayor dialed up Robinette. By this point, anyone who had a radio in the Greater New Orleans area was tuned in to WWL. Now operating out of Baton Rouge, Robinette’s show was being broadcast by Clear Channel. “I just got furious on the air [that day],” Robinette recalled. “I didn’t care if I had a job or not. I kept saying … to the U.S. government, ‘Where are you? Where the hell are you?’ ” In came the calls from as far away as England and Australia. “I’m in one of my rants saying, ‘This is day four! People are dying on the streets! They’re dying on the overpasses! They had no food!’ Just ranting like that, and suddenly on the other line was Sally Forman with Mayor Nagin. And he just started echoing what I’d been saying.”
As Nagin spoke, Clarkson and Forman were standing at his side, encouraging him. He pointedly demanded federal troops, even though he knew federal troops were on the way. And yet the way he lashed out was a perfect reflection of the mood of the city on Thursday. In speaking of his contact with President Bush, Nagin said, “I told him we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice.” At one point, Nagin remarked, “I will tell you this: you know, God is looking down on all this, and if [people] are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price.” Then he went on: “People don’t want to talk about this, but I’m going to talk about it. You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that’s the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They’re looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.
“I’ll tell you, man, I’m probably going [to] get in a whole bunch of trouble [and] you probably won’t even want to deal with me after this interview is over, but we authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick I don’t know whose problem [Katrina] is. I don’t know whether it’s the governor’s problem. I don’t know whether it’s the president’s problem. But somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now.”
Robinette asked what the station could do to help. “Organize people to write letters,” said Nagin, “and make calls to their congressmen.… I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences.… Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now, get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.”
When Nagin hung up the phone, he broke down crying, according to Clarkson. Nagin would later admit that it was an emotional moment. He sequestered himself in the bathroom, Clarkson recalled, and wouldn’t come out. For 20 minutes or so both Clarkson and Forman tried to lift his spirits as they heard him tinkering inside, re-arranging knickknacks and toiletries. In the distance they could hear booming explosions and see columns of smoke. Nagin eventually emerged, then wandered into another room. “Let me be alone for a while,” Clarkson remembered him saying.
Both Clarkson and Forman, though, were proud that their boss had told Bush and Blanco to “get off your asses and do something.” Clarkson said, looking back, “I think the world needed to hear it. I think the government needed to hear it. I’ll tell you, two hours later, that general was on that highway, that convoy was [coming].”
Meanwhile, Michael Brown continued to engage in bizarre e-mail exchanges. “Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt … all shirts,” Brown’s press secretary, Sharon Worthy, instructed him. “Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this crisis and on TV you need to look more hardworking.”
But perhaps the most cryptic political face-off of the week occurred when Brown did a spot check of devastated St. Bernard Parish. First, he met with parish president Junior Rodriguez. Brown recalled it as “a very vulgar, profanity-spewing encounter with him. Very entertaining. It was surprising to me. So after leaving this meeting with him, who I think is in charge of St. Bernard, somebody pulled me aside and said, ‘O.K., you’ve done this, but you really have to go see Sheriff Jack Stephens.’ ”
Brown was perplexed. “Well,” he recalls being told, “it’s almost like a Mafia thing, but they both think they’re in charge of this parish.” According to Brown, his security guards put him in a Humvee and made a circuitous trek down back roads. “I even joked with one of my aides, ‘Hey, they’re taking me to go dump me in the river somewhere … ’ It was wild.” Eventually, Brown was escorted to a forlorn houseboat straight out of The Return of Swamp Thing, with touches of Bonnie and Clyde. Even though Brown had grown up in Oklahoma and had had a hardscrabble youth, he was stunned when he was ushered into the inner sanctum of Sheriff Jack Stephens. “He had commandeered someone’s houseboat and I walked in and it was like a scene in a movie. I’d just been in St. Bernard with Rodriguez, where they had minimal supplies, and we’re having a discussion about what [provisions] you need. [Then] I go to see this sheriff who is now living on this houseboat and I walk into this huge buffet. It was astonishing to me.… I felt like I’m walking into a Mafia meeting somewhere, and I walk in, and I swear to God, there’s … hors d’oeuvres and things, and there’s all the liquor you could drink, and it was absolutely fascinating to me.”
Brown listened to Stephens’s litany of complaints and demands, sizing him up as “a slick politician kind of guy … with all these deputies all around, with these guns everywhere.” Observing one of the aides or a policeman continually spitting tobacco into a cup, Brown began plotting an exit strategy. “I turned to my security guys and said, ‘There’s nothing here for me to do and I don’t know why I’m talking to this guy.’ … And we boogied out of there.”
FRIDAY. At nine a.m., the president boarded Air Force One for the three-hour flight to Mobile. Then he was on to Biloxi, then New Orleans. En route, he sat down to watch a series of newsclips compiled onto a DVD by Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. (Later, Bush would tell NBC anchor Brian Williams, “I don’t see a lot of the news. Every morning I look at the newspaper. I can’t say I’ve read every single article in the newspaper.… I mean, I can tell you what the headlines are.”)
Among those on board, along with Michael Chertoff, were two African-American leaders: the secretary of housing and urban development, Alphonso Jackson, and William Jefferson, the first black man to be elected to Congress from Louisiana since Reconstruction and a powerful member of the Ways and Means Committee, through which post-Katrina aid would inevitably flow. Both men urged the president to “reach out” to the black community. “Alphonso and I felt it was important for the president to put his feet on the ground in New Orleans,” Jefferson said. “He was going to visit the 17th Street Canal, which was fine, but that was upscale and white. We thought he needed to meet the folks that were hurt.… But [security advisers] thought it was too dangerous for him to be seen in a possibly angry crowd.”
Jefferson found President Bush to be in a tough, no-nonsense mood as far as Katrina was concerned. He was extremely focused. As he watched the DVD coverage on board, Jefferson said, the president’s “jaw dropped” upon seeing the devastation. He didn’t seem to want to hear that relief efforts had been slowed down. At one juncture, Bush was shown a post-Katrina fire billowing. “What’s that?” he snapped at Chertoff. Browbeaten, Chertoff explained that there were isolated fires but fire departments were in disarray and water hoses lacked sufficient pressure to extinguish them. Bush exploded: “Put the fire out, now! There is water everywhere. I want the fire out.” Brown would eventually become the public whipping boy for Katrina, but President Bush was taking his frustration out on Chertoff.
Waiting in Mobile with a bear hug for the president was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. They were extremely tight. When Bush was elected governor of Texas, Barbour was the bare-knuckle chairman of the Republican National Committee. While some Republicans had jumped ship that week, criticizing Bush’s Katrina stance, Barbour remained loyal. “When he got to me, he cried,” Barbour recalled. “Tears just ran down his cheeks. It made me cry.”
Michael Brown was also there to meet the delegation, along with Alabama’s Republican governor, Bob Riley. Riley praised the state’s initiatives to help those affected. He spoke positively about the involvement of FEMA. The good feelings made for a heartening start to the president’s tour: Alabama had been hit, though not nearly as hard as its neighbors. Nonetheless, the assessment and the warm welcome may very well have put Bush in a better-than-expected mood, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The journey had yet to begin, after all.
President Bush thanked the people of the three Gulf Coast states for their compassion in the storm’s aftermath, and he made reference to others integral to the recovery. “Again, I want to thank you all for … ,” President Bush said, with his voice trailing off in midsentence, “and Brownie,” he continued—referring to the FEMA director—“you’re doing a heck of a job.” The phrase, the nickname, the chumminess became emblematic of the president’s ignorance about the situation and telegraphed an almost casual attitude toward a massive humanitarian emergency. Now President Bush, essentially M.I.A. since the weekend, was saying that Brown was performing admirably. “That was my ‘tipping point,’ ” Brown would later reflect. “[When] he used the nickname with me, it caused the mainstream media to go, ‘Who the hell is that? Who is this guy, this guy from FEMA?’ ” As the morning progressed, the tragedy was somehow fomenting farce.
As the president toured the 17th Street Canal breach, Air Force One sat on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong International Airport. In the next few minutes, various state, local, and federal officials, few of whose reputations had been enhanced over the last five days, would convene aboard the aircraft. And each of them knew it. Nagin, arriving before the president, was offered a hot shower by an attendant on board, remembered Ron Forman. Having lived in humid weather for days without any clean water, Nagin leapt at the chance.
A top priority for Nagin, in addition to the shower, was that his head be shaved properly, possibly for his photo op with President Bush. But, like a teenager, Nagin just wouldn’t get out of the bathroom. Aides rapped on the door, telling the mayor, “You’ve got five minutes and then the president gets here.” They knocked again. But, still, Nagin dallied. Finally, the security service had had enough. One agent kicked the door and told Nagin to get out; the president had arrived and didn’t have time to waste on vanity.
“Damn,” Nagin said, as he walked out into the aisle, so Forman would recall. “I wasn’t ready to get out of the shower! I was shaving my head and I was showering and, God, there was warm and hot water!” When asked later what he most remembered about Air Force One, Nagin would say, “Well, you know for me it was a relief from everything I had been doing.… I got a chance to take a shower.… It was kind of nice.”
When the meeting began in the conference area near the middle of the plane—with Governor Blanco and Senator David Vitter in attendance as well—the discussion went around the table, each official telling a story of incompetence or sheer lack of cooperation on the part of FEMA. U.S. representative Bobby Jindal told Newsweek that “the president just shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing”—even though similar stories had been reported in the media for days. Vitter and Nagin pressed the point of the necessity for troop deployment. Earlier in the week, Vitter had relayed messages from Rove’s aides to Blanco’s office, suggesting that the governor assign the president the ultimate authority over National Guard units. Blanco, however, could not see how that would help and, indeed, thought it might hinder efforts.
Everyone at the meeting was aware of the tension between the president and the governor over the troops issue. Perhaps Ray Nagin saw his role as that of the stick of dynamite that could break the logjam, because the mayor, Vitter recalled, lost his temper, slammed his hand down on the table, and insisted that a chain of command needed to be established. He was trembling. The discussion was overheated, one of the attendees told Newsweek, and about “as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved.” As Nagin would describe it, “I was anxious. So by the time we got around to me, I probably pushed a little harder than I should have.”
Nagin’s theatrics paid off; he had forced the president and governor to resolve their differences. Bush and Blanco repaired to a separate section of the plane, and the governor, still concerned with state-versus-federal distinctions, agreed to respond within 24 hours to a Bush proposal for providing some 13,000 National Guard troops. In the end, the governor refused to sign the White House document that would have handed over state sovereignty to Bush; the president dispatched troops anyway; and Blanco maintained nominal control. She had faced down the president, on her own terms.
Looking back, Blanco would confess to having been flabbergasted by Nagin’s performance, perplexed by the fist pounding, the cusswords. He seemed to be praising the president, even though the day before, on the radio, he had roundly criticized him. In her eyes, he was unprofessional and, she feared, coming unglued—a term Nagin himself would later use to characterize his condition at the time. “It was bizarre,” she said in hindsight. “When we met on Air Force One, Nagin was falling apart.”
Even though Blanco had lost much of her respect for Nagin, she phoned him after that meeting. “I called him … like that night, and said, ‘Ray, you need to get out of town. You need to go sleep somewhere.’ What was going on was that he was locked up [in] the Hyatt and anyone who wanted to see him had to climb 24 [sic] flights of stairs, and he was afraid to come out. But he’d come out once a day or something like that and go make some crazy remarks to the media and then go hide. I said, ‘Go sleep somewhere for a couple of days and then come back into it.’ Well, then he left for five days! In the heat of everything that was going on, he’s screaming about no leadership and he’s a total void.”
Those five days began on Wednesday, September 7. During that period, Nagin left New Orleans. He went to Dallas. He leased a house. “Why,” Nagin wondered, “would a governor of the state of Louisiana be ticked about that? I don’t get that. I mean, I took care of my city as best I could. I got it organized. I got rescues. I got just about everybody out. I didn’t leave until that last bus left New Orleans.… Then I went to take care of my family. Why does that upset somebody?”
In N.O.P.D. circles, Nagin’s handle over the police radio had been “New Orleans One.” Now, furious that Nagin had abandoned them—and had secured a home while New Orleans was underwater—some in the police force dubbed him “Dallas One.” A few officers even made “Dallas One” signs as a protest, posting them around the makeshift Sixth District headquarters at the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street. “I pulled the signs down,” police superintendent Eddie Compass recalled. “I told the guys it just wasn’t good for the city.”
SATURDAY. By the end of that first week, President Bush had tried every way possible to pressure Governor Blanco into ceding control of the troops in her state, and, along with it, effectively handing over the responsibility for the course of the recovery effort. It was the sort of political fight that Bush was used to winning. But Blanco stood up to him. Few politicians had done that before, that directly, with so much at stake. President Bush, operating with majorities in both houses of Congress and what he seemed to regard as a mandate stemming from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, had been able to blunt confrontation or ignore opposition at most other critical stages of his presidency. Yet Blanco, in refusing to give the president the chance to take charge, gambled everything. She no doubt felt that, due to missteps by the White House and mismanagement by FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the mayor’s office, the momentum of the disaster response was about to change—in her favor. And change it did on Saturday, September 3, as buses finally emptied the convention center of most of those left homeless by the flooding.
Blanco’s was a struggle largely hidden from the public eye. But her effective, if clumsy, showdown with the president subtly changed the second term of George W. Bush, leaving him open to other attempts to curtail the sweeping power he had assumed for himself. In the span of one week last summer, the United States was changed, and not just along the battered coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. The nation, eventually, could always bounce back from a natural disaster. Instead, the Great Deluge of New Orleans had turned out to be a disaster of another sort—one that, through breached levees and massive governmental incompetence, the country had actually brought upon itself.
Douglas Brinkley is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Coast was published by HarperCollins.
[Thanks to my legman, David in TN, for sending this along.]
No comments:
Post a Comment